


Flesh and Stone

by sasabrina



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Art School, Bedelia Du Maurier is a museum curator, Beverly Katz is still too cool for my life, Hannibal is a statue, Jack Crawford is an overbearing art professor, M/M, Will Graham is an art student
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:54:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25417264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sasabrina/pseuds/sasabrina
Summary: Will Graham, an art student struggling with his senior thesis, sees a bust that begins to haunt his dreams.
Relationships: Will Graham & Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 37
Kudos: 288
Collections: Wendigo & Stag





	Flesh and Stone

(Inspired by reapersun_art's [beautiful work](https://twitter.com/reapersun_art/status/1238479935494221826?s=20))

“He lifts up both his hands to feel the work,  
and wonders if it can be ivory,  
because it seems to him more truly flesh. —  
his mind refusing to conceive of it  
as ivory, he kisses it and feels  
his kisses are returned.”

Ovid, _Metamorphoses_ (trans. by Brookes More)

  
“He kissed her, closing his eyes  
To divine an answering kiss of life  
In her perfect lips.  
And he would not believe  
They were after all only ivory.”

Ted Hughes, _Tales From Ovid_

  
Will didn't want to go to the exhibition of Renaissance sculptures from Lithuania at the Baltimore Museum for the Arts. How could he spend an afternoon looking at still marble statues from hundreds of years ago when he was in deep shit with Professor Jack Crawford? And besides, Will didn’t like sculptures. While he understood their value as an art form, he found the medium limiting. No one ever got faces right in cold stone or clay. 

“Come on, it will be good for you. Fill your well and all that,” Beverly said as she pulled Will bodily through the ornate wooden doors of the Verger Portrait Gallery. Beverly was Will's roommate and a sculptor which meant that she had strong arms and a finely-tuned barometer to Will's bullshit. Something Will was usually thankful for. Usually.

She was, of course, referring to the fact that Jack Crawford, Will’s thesis advisor, had once again trashed Will’s latest proposal. Jack Crawford was an exacting man and as brutal a critic as he was a painter. When Will had told Beverly that he was getting advised by Professor Crawford, she had insisted Will bow a few times in front of the Buddha she kept in their apartment to appease her mother.

  
“ _The problem, Will, is that your work has no through-line. No indication of your presence or point of view._ ” Jack had said to Will just that morning.

“ _But they’re portraits, Jack. They’re supposed to be paintings of the subject. Revelatory._ ” Will had argued.

“ _Yes, Will. And your work is very much ‘of the subject’. You have done that marvelously -- captured the essence and personality of your subject. When I look at these, I see them. I know them, I feel their pain and their desires. It is all very good._ ”

“ _So what’s the problem?_ ” Will had felt the animalistic urge to throttle Jack at that very moment.

“ _There is nothing of you in it. I see them but I do not see you. I know who these people are, Will, but who are you? What do these portraits say about you as an artist? As a person?_ ”

The discussion had been one they had been having for most of Will’s senior term. He had, of course, anticipated Jack Crawford to be a difficult mentor. The man had a reputation to live up to. And Will had even welcomed the challenge. Great art was never easy, right? If he had to struggle for something great, Will was prepared to do just that. But the strife delivered by Jack Crawford was teetering on the edge of too much. The man seemed to derive a unique pleasure from agitating Will. And Will had just quit smoking. 

So Will let Beverly pull him in. He was done fighting for today.

  
Inside, the sculptures were set up, a circular arrangement of white stone corpses propped up on pedestals. Will felt a chill run through his spine. For a moment, the image of walking through the scene of a murder flashed in his mind. Will heard Beverly give a small squeal and turned to watch his friend dive immediately to the centerpiece of the exhibit. It was a statue of a woman that was monumental in every way. Will joined her at the sculpture’s feet, angling his face upward to follow the lines of her draping toga, caught in the moment of falling off her shoulders. It was quite an impressive feat, Will had to admit. But it wasn’t exactly his thing. He couldn’t see her face.

As Beverly continued to follow the rest of the exhibit, Will found himself studying the portraits on the wall instead. They were the Verger’s own private collection. Portraits of family members. They apparently dated back to as early as the American Civil War, which, Will learned, was when the family began earning its fortune. They were exactly the kind of work Will despised: self-aggrandizing, dishonest, and trite. They were, however, much more diverting than the carved marble in the center of the room.

Will was so absorbed in the horror of the portrait of the current head of the Verger Family (sitting, dark tones to highlight a bloated white face that Will wanted to tear apart) that he almost missed it. 

It had been placed in the corner of the exhibit, apart from the other sculptures as if to demarcate its strangeness. It was, after all, the only bust in a room of grand bodies of marble set on ridiculously high pedestals. Perhaps it was the fact that it was the only face that he could clearly see that caught Will’s attention.

The bust was situated on a marble stand so that its eyes were only a little higher than Will’s own. Combined with the fact that the statute itself was gazing downward, Will felt the distinct impression of a slightly taller gentleman gazing at him.

The effect was breathtaking.

It wasn’t that the bust had any apparent artistic distinction. In fact, it looked exactly like any other marble bust Will had seen. It was wrought of a smooth, white marble that shone coldly in the museum light. 

It was the face itself that attracted Will. The patrician nose and high cheekbones gave the face a quiet dignity. His high forehead conveyed wisdom and age. Will ached to draw his deep set eyes and prominent brow bone. And his lips…

Will felt himself licking his own lips. 

“Please keep distance from the pieces, ” a uniformed museum guard warned Will loudly, breaking the moment.

Will shot him an apologetic smile and straightened his back. He hadn’t even realized that he was leaning in so close to the marble bust. 

“Hey,” Beverly said, appearing right behind Will. “See something you like?”

Will felt a rush of heat spread across his face.

“I mean... the piece,” Beverly explained, worry flashing across her face. “It’s a bust. That’s as close to portraiture as a sculpture can get.”

Will felt the urge to kick himself in the face. “Right.”

“Says here that the bust is of some guy called Hannibal,” Beverly said, reading off the gold plaque posted on the stand of the bust. “ _Head of the Lithuanian House of Lecter during the 16th century,”_ Beverly paused to consider something. “If he was the patriarch of the Lecter family during the height of the Italian Renaissance, he would have commissioned most of these pieces.” 

Beverly took a step back, falling in line with Will and tipping her head to the side in the way she did when she was processing pieces. “Interesting, don’t you think?”

“I don’t find him that interesting,” Will commented dryly.

*

Will didn’t even notice he was still thinking about the bust until he sat at his workstation in his tiny studio at the college the next morning. He had picked up a charcoal pencil and had sketched freely, allowing the movement of the pencil against the thick sketching paper to guide his hand. 

Within the hour, he had a sketch of the bust, of Hannibal, as he remembered seeing it for the first time.

Will looked over his sketch and, after deciding that he didn’t like the way his stomach twisted itself into knots while looking at his own work, he tucked the drawing away into his leather portfolio with half a mind never to take it out again.

*

The next weekend, however, Will found himself in front of Hannibal’s bust once again. 

It wasn’t a conscious decision on his part to visit the bust again. Will remembered sitting in the bus and flashing his student pass at the front desk. He remembered walking through the pristinely white museum lobby and up the stairs with his leather folio bag. He remembered walking into the Verger Portrait Room and sitting on the bench that was situated right in front of the bust. He did not have a why to his actions. But he was here. And he was drawing.

He came back every day that week. Sitting at the wide wooden bench in his paint-stained jeans, the only sign of the hours going by was the ache in Will’s legs that forced him to shift positions every so often. Every day that week, Will entered the museum after lunch and did not get up until a uniformed officer politely informed him that the museum would be closing for the evening.

By the end of the week, Will had what was probably hundreds of drawings of the Hannibal bust from every angle and in every style imaginable. 

“You should paint these,” Beverly said to him over pizza and beer on the sofa in the tiny apartment they shared over a laundromat.

“That’s ridiculous,” Will said, shoving a hot slice of four cheese and pepperoni. 

*

The problem with ridiculous ideas is that one tends to pursue them when one was desperate. And if there was one thing Will was, it was desperate. 

“It’s a study of projecting identity, rather than portraying it,” Will explained, wringing his hands while Jack examined his latest painting as it stood drying on the easel. He had that impenetrable scowl on his face, the one that made him infamous among the visual arts students for being “difficult”, bordering on “draconic”. 

Jack looked for what felt like forever.

“Have concepts for your collection and a write up on my desk first thing next week,” was all Jack said before silently walking out the door.

*

Every night for the next week, Will had the same dream.

It always started with his hands. Will would see his hands covered in a fine white powder and chipping away at a piece of marble. He did not know what he was making, much in the way no one really knows what they are doing in dreams. But Will hammered on, watching himself move the chisel against stone, watching the curves and dips emerge like sand banks at low tide. 

Then, the sense of a presence behind him. The feeling of a nose pressing itself against his curls, lips caressing his ear. Will does not face the presence. He continues working as hands come around his waist, as a chin rests itself on his shoulder. He is not ignoring the presence, Will knows. This is just how they are.

And then, he awakens.

The first thing Will notices as he emerges into reality is the smell of his own sweat. He is always drenched after these dreams, his longing painful against the fabric of his shorts. Every morning, he strips off his clothes, unsure of his bearings. In his half-awake state, he stares, naked and wet, at the imaginary shapes in the popcorn ceiling above him. 

He rises only when he is fully awake. However, as he goes about his day, a tiny part of him doubts that he had always been in his apartment in Baltimore. 

The reason for this hits Will much later on, days after Jack Crawford handed Will back his concept sketches and told him to have something to show in a week. He was eating out with Beverly in their favorite Chinese restaurant when Will realizes that the reason why he has such a difficult time coming out of those dreams was because of the smell.

He knows what his room smells like. Musty and pungent from all the sweat he wakes up drenched in. But the smell that lingers in his brain the moment he wakes is the heady scent of orange, jasmine, and of something, no, someone, Will couldn’t put his finger on.

“No, I don’t keep any jasmine,” Beverly says when Will asks right after he asks their server what kind of tea they were drinking, “and I’ve never smelt it in the apartment.”

Will can see that Beverly looks worried about him.

Will is a little worried about himself as well.

*

He continues visiting the bust. Hannibal, Will has begun to call him. He takes hours studying the planes of Hannibal’s face so that he can draw him entirely from memory. Will allows himself to get lost in the curves of the elegant nose, the dip in the flesh under the cheekbones, the downward tease of the collarbones. It occurs to Will that he is the master of Hannibal’s geography. He is a cartographer, able to draw maps of Hannibal’s face at a moment’s notice. He knows this terrain like he knows the veins and stubborn paint stains that make their home in his own hands.

But still, he allows himself to dreamily get lost in this deeply familiar territory.

*

One day, a woman in a severe red dress and perfectly styled blonde hair sits beside Will on his usual bench in front of Hannibal.

“Fascinating, isn’t he?” she asks Will, her voice breathy with wonder.

Will looks at the stranger. He recognizes her as Bedelia Du Maurier, Curator of Antiquities at the Museum. She sometimes gives lectures at the art college. Will remembers sitting in one of her lectures as a sophomore. 

“Do you know that we aren’t entirely certain that this is the famous Hannibal of House Lecter?” she continues on, as if giving a presentation. “The Lecter family, however, likes to believe that this is a depiction of their most famous relative. The time period would be correct. And Hannibal Lecter’s patronage of the arts is well-documented in many writings, his own as well as others. But nowhere is it mentioned that he ever had any depiction of himself made. Which is odd.”

“You don’t think it’s him?” Will asks.

“Oh I do think it is him,” Bedelia says, looking at Will for the first time. Her eyes make Will want to look away. “A portrait of some form is always the first thing rich aristocrats will have commissioned.”

“An exhibition of wealth,” Will says.

“A bid for immortality,” Bedelia counters.

They are silent for a moment. 

“But it is not unheard of for artists to take the initiative to capture their patron,” Bedelia continues.

Will furrowed his brow in confusion.

“It is a popular theory that William Shakespeare referred to his patron, Henry Wriothesley, in his most famous poem. Sometimes, artists find the temptation to capture the visage of their generous patron too difficult to resist.”

“So a dedication of love,” Will says.

“Gratitude. Dedication. Lust. The reasons, if there are any, for choosing to capture a person in one’s work are wide and varied. Love is certainly one of them.”

Will feels heat rise to his cheeks.

“Tell me, do you see love when you look on Hannibal’s face?” Bedelia asks him.

“I don’t know what I see.”

Bedelia goes silent, her eyes falling back to the bust of Hannibal in front of them. Will thinks he sees a fondness in her gaze. Like she was looking on an old flame, long forgotten to time and circumstance.

“The strangest fact about this piece, I think, is that Hannibal Lecter does not write about this statue when he wrote a detailed account of all the others,” Bedelia says when she breaks the silence between them.

“Statue?”

“Yes,” Bedelia says, pointing at the uneven bottom of the bust. “Most busts will end cleanly below the breast if they don’t have a finished stand. This one does not. It’s likely that this piece was broken off a full-body statute.”

*

When Will dreams that night, he realizes what it is he is making. What he has been making all this time.

It is a statue of a naked Achilles, looking down from a high pedestal. A great hero gloriously caught in a moment of ordinary repose. 

_And why shouldn’t he be Achilles?_ Will finds himself thinking. _He is a man of great intelligence, strength and passion. His anger is like ice. His love, like fire._

Will continues carving what was to be the feet of the statue when he is interrupted by the sound of his workshop’s door swinging open.

“You’re still working?” the voice asks. It has the quality of poisoned honey, Will thinks. Thick and dangerous. 

“You pay me to work, Your Grace,” Will finds himself replying, looking up from his work.

Will knows this man. He has known him all along. The face is a face he knows all too well, the lines of which he knows how to trace even with his eyes closed. He is to carve that face into marble. He is to try and replicate a masterpiece of nature with his own, inadequate hands. 

_Hannibal_.

He approaches Will and studies the progress of the statue Will is working on. A copy of Hannibal stands half-finished as if emerging from the ocean of marble. Hannibal considers the work before him. Will holds his breath in anticipation.

“Tell me, William, what do you see when you look at your work?” 

“Excuse me, Your Grace?” Will asks.

“Come,” Hannibal says, looking at Will with eyes that leave him breathless, “I’d say we’re past the need for such formalities. I’ll recall that you have said my name before... albeit under very different circumstances.”

Will feels a blush form on his cheeks. Will knows by the way Hannibal's lips curve into an amused smile that he sees it too. Will feels his face heat up even further.

Will lets out a nervous laugh. He cannot believe he is about to say this. 

“I see a beauty divine.”

Hannibal’s eyebrow quirks up ever so slightly. “That is a bold statement to make about one’s own work,” he says. His tone is only a little bit teasing.

“Not my work,” Will tries to explain, shaking his head, “it is what I try to capture.”

The way Hannibal looks at him pierces deep into Will’s stomach.

“My, my, William. A sculptor and a poet? I have landed myself quite the artist.”

They are standing close together now. Will can see the fine lines in the corner of Hannibal’s eyes, his fine blonde lashes. Will can feel Hannibal’s breath against his lips. He has been here before, he knows. And he knows where this is going. 

Will looks up and challenges Hannibal forward with his eyes. 

He wakes up before Hannibal can answer.

*

In the next few weeks, Will is so busy with his paintings that he hardly finds the time to visit the bust. Jack is still incredibly demanding, making Will repeat a few portraits and even once throwing one of his staplers behind Will’s retreating head as Will slams the door to Jack’s office. Not that Will didn’t deserve it. He had raised his voice first.

“They’re all quite sexual, aren’t they?” Beverly said while studying Will’s work, her head tipped to the side.

Will decided that it was better not to comment on that.

Before Will knew it, their Senior exhibition had come and gone. Bedelia had even come to see his collection. “Becoming” he had called it. But his last days in school were fast-approaching. He has packed up his things and was looking forward to going home and spending some time with his dogs.

Before he goes, however, Will knows there is only one thing he must do.

The bust is still there, just as he remembers it. It is stone after all. There is no reason for it to change. But looking at it now, Will thinks he sees a little more life. He sees the fine lines in the corner of the eyes, the faint line of a fading scar on the cheek, the fine hairs on the skin. The flesh looks soft.

Will finds himself staring at the bust’s lips. He remembers with frustration that he always woke up before Hannibal’s lips ever met his.

Will looked around. The uniformed guard was all the way on the other side of the room. It would only be for a moment. He wouldn’t get caught.

He took a step closer to the bust, breaching the invisible line that demarcated the proper distance between the viewer and the artwork. He took one last look at the bust’s milk-white eyes before closing his own and leaning forward.

The marble felt cold against his lips. He could taste the fine layer of dust that had accumulated on its surface. For a moment, Will scolded himself for being so stupid. What did he expect? It was a marble bust after all.

And then, somewhere in the middle of his internal, embarrassed tirade, he felt it. The weight of lips pressing against his own. The caress of an exhale against his cupid’s bow. The marble under his lips felt warm.

Will knows it is all in his head. He knows it isn’t real. How could it be? But for a moment, just one tiny moment, Will lets himself dream.

THE END.

**Author's Note:**

> Endnote: Finally! It’s done. It may not look like it but the amount of RESEARCH that went into this very short fic was… *sigh*. Let me just say that I am fairly confident that most of the things I posit in this fic are plausible given History. At some point I researched whether perfume was popular during the Renaissance and which scents were most popular among the aristocracy. Hence, orange and jasmine. There was a deep dive into the history of Lithuania and their trade relations with Italy during the 16th century. It was… a lot. And I live nowhere near Europe so it’s not like these things are taught in school. Well they are (yay, Colonialism) but school was a very long time ago.
> 
> This work was inspired by this beautiful piece by @reapersun_art over on twitter https://twitter.com/reapersun_art/status/1238479935494221826?s=20


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